Born Of Lakes And Plains: Mixed-Descent Peoples And The Making Of The American West, by Anne F. Hyde

The author of this book is struggling with something deeply ironic in light of the contemporary obsession with identity politics in writing about a group of people who had backgrounds mixed between European and American fathers (generally) and native American/First Peoples mothers, born of the alliances between fur traders and locals whose knowledge and involvement were essential in the success of the fur trade and trading in general in the large area extending from the Great Lakes and Hudson Bay area to the Pacific Northwest and Commanche Texas and Spanish/Mexican New Mexico. On the one hand, what leads the author to write about these people is the nature of their mixed parentage and the specific circumstances that produced a large group of people, but at the same time the author bristles at the generally racist language that is used to describe the mixing of peoples in sometimes unofficial and unrecognized ways, while also pointing out just as clearly that regardless of the mixed ancestry of the people she writes about, their identities were often clearly with the tribes they descended from because they were viewed as culturally members of the tribes they belonged to even if their ancestry was mixed. The author seemed to think that it was a problem just coming out and saying this, because it seems to irritate her to have to describe these characters who are recorded as “half-breeds” and other like terms while being fully accepted by the native cultures they were in-part descended from. One gets the feeling in reading this book that the author was trying to convey something that perhaps she did not fully understand, that the acceptance of people into a given culture is not so much about blood or about “race” as much as it is to a mutual willingness of people to share in the same culture and in the same lifestyle and approach, and that so long as the people involved and accepted by a given culture act in ways that reflect and support the best interests of the group, that acceptance can transcend the sort of blood quantities that so obsessed many Western observers.

Despite the way that the author struggled with questions of identity and conveying how it is that the people she wrote about were accepted by various native cultures (or not, in some cases), there is nevertheless a pervasive feeling of melancholy that undergirds the entire book. The author speaks about groups of people whose descendants live on to this day among various peoples who made various choices about who they belonged with and what cultures and communities they were a part of. Yet despite the fact that there was a great deal of hope and optimism as well as love and strategic thinking in the alliances that were formed between European and American men and well-connected women from local tribes who saw these alliances as being in the best interests of tribes, in reading this book there is an insistent note of doom that the fur trade and general mercantile interests that joined these people together was doomed in the face of massive demographic results of America’s (and Canada’s, to a lesser extent) settler colonialism. The peoples the author talked about made their business in space, navigating the space between European rulers and customers and native peoples, in the space between competing tribes or alliances of tribes, competing empires, competing trade companies, and even in some cases competing tendencies within themselves as to what they wanted from life. The result of the author’s writing is a complicated and compelling example of people whose lives were complicated by the difficulties of their time and of circumstances that were far beyond their control which at first led to the development of people able to operate in two worlds but eventually led to the descendants of these same people having to make choices as to which world they should try to make their own way, some of whom were not given the opportunity to choose at all.

In terms of its contents, this book is more than 300 pages long and is divided into twelve chapters that are organized in a basically chronological order. The book begins with maps, a note on terms, and a preface. After this the author provides a prologue that discusses the seasons of marriage and war within the native society of North America and a discussion of the mixture of blood in the fur trade of the Great Lakes area from 1670 to 1790 (1). After this the author talks about the beginnings of the families in this historical survey in the experience of wintering families and the experience of corporate war over the fur trade (2). After this the author discusses the migrant McKays and their move to the Pacific Northwest and the experience of the Canadian Johnstons from 1800 to 1820 (3). This is followed by the remaking of the fur trade in the midst of a complex corporate rivalry from 1810 to 1830 (4). The author takes a thread from the area of Sault St. Marie to the Oregon territory from 1818 to 1838 (5) after that, before discussing how it is that the Bent family helped forge peace in the Southern Plains from 1821 to 1840 (6). After this the book takes a decidedly melancholy turn, with a discussion of the rivers of trouble in Indian country from 1831 to 1843 (7), the borderland violence of the 1840s (8), surviving war and peace in the 1850s (9), and the Civil War experience of the West from 1860 to 1865 (10). After this the author concludes with a discussion of the reconstruction experience involving race in the western reservations from 1866 to 1885 (11) as well as allotment policy and the question of blood and identity from 1880 to 1907 (12). The book then closes with an epilogue about the 20th century as well as acknowledgements, notes, and an index.